Wednesday, September 25, 2013

XAF it’s a great platform simply because everything is pluggable and reusable! In this post I will demonstrate one more pluggable and reusable contribution – the MapView module from Sergej Derjabkin!

Scenario: We have a business object which has an Address property and we want to display them in Google maps. However we have no time to research or develop anything by ourselves.

Step1: Install the MapView module by drag & drop from the toolbox.

Step2: Open Application Model editor to configure from where the module will take its data. This requires that we locate the Customer in the BOModel node and simply change the attributes as illustrated below.

Step3: To display the Customer Addresses, the MapView module provides the MapListEditor. Simply install the MapViewWebModule and assign the list editor to the Customer_ListView.

Step4: Run the XAF web app and see the results in the map!

Bonus scenario: Display a detail view of the mapped address.

Sergej Derjabkin also contributed webmaster detail functionality which is available with XpandSystemAspNetModule so install it as in Step1 and set the MasterDetailMode attribute to ListViewAndDetailView. Youi ‘ll need to override the SupportMasterDetailMode of your WebApplication descendant and return true.

Simple and fast – the XAF way!

Sergej Derjabkin released his MapView module as a preview in eXpand v13.1.7.2 and asked me to get your feedback in order to develop further, so feel free to thank him personally and ask your questions or even contribute your code or ideas in eXpand forums. To see MapView module in action use the Demos/Modules/MapView/MapViewTester.sln found in eXpandFramework sources.

Monday, September 23, 2013

Using the next version 13.1.7.3 of eXpandFramework consider designing your shortcuts in a platform agnostic module because it will be possible to be used in your web apps as is!

To enable the web shortcuts you need to install the XpandSystemAspNetModule. If you want to disable them you can use the model setting you see below.

For this implementation I used the jwerty javascript library, however this library cannot detect successfully a few shortcuts used by the browser such as the Ctrl+N and the Ctrl+T. Therefore I added the CtrlNReplacement, CtrlTReplacement attributes you see in the image above. If you know a better library than jwerty that works better I can replace it at once.

This functionality is embedded in the XpandSecurityWinModule/XpandSecurityWebModule depending on the platform you use. All eXpand modules are in the toolbox for fast Drag & Drop installation.

Configuration

The configuration for this feature as excepted can be found in the XAFApplication Model options node under the Registration sub node as illustrated below.

Attribute Enabled : Setting it to true two extra action Register and ForgotPassword will be activated in the Logon form as shown

UserModelClass: Here we can configure the type of user that will be created

EmailMember: This is a lookup of all members of UserModelClass and is only to save the email.

RoleModelClass && RoleCriteria: Using those two attributes we can configure which roles will be assigned to the new registered user.

Hope you find it useful and you have a lot of feedback for it in eXpand forums.

p.s. : This implementation does not send registration or pass forgotten emails. I will release a new EmailModule following the workflow presented in Declarative data auditing. Do not forget that we are talking about highly extensible modules as all XAF modules are so, In the meantime it is really easy to write a controller and send the mail you like.

Monday, September 16, 2013

Although XAF has many communication channels like the official support center, the XAF facebook site, the eXpand forums etc. apparently there is a need for a forum dedicated only to XAF where people can discuss anything XAF related without either the XAF or the eXpand team will interfere unless explicitly requested of course.

Welcome to my Blog

My name is Apostolis Bekiaris and I am working for DevExpress as a technical evangelist for the frameworks team, .Net is my passion and at this blog you will find a lot of my work using DevExpress Xaf framework and many others. If you want to contact me you can use the link bellow